


being and time

by hwatokki



Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Forgetting, HoHong centric, M/M, Pirates, implied death(?), other members make brief appearances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:01:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27944963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hwatokki/pseuds/hwatokki
Summary: sometimes death is a kinder fate
Relationships: Jeong Yunho/Kim Hongjoong
Kudos: 9





	being and time

**Author's Note:**

> i haven't actually ever written anything on this account so hello! this was my entry for the storyline event that ateez hosted for their fever era promotions (circa july 2020) and it's an au based on hongjoong and yunho's diary film excerpts! be kind in the comments, constructive criticism is always welcome

-⧖-

“Hyung?”

Yunho can hear in the distinct timbre of Hongjoong's voice something that suggests… a kind of finality that scares him. The others have already gone and they are alone and all Yunho wants to do is run, run and grab his hand and drag the other with him. But Hongjoong has already insisted that this last part of the journey is one that he must travel alone, and Yunho is nothing if not loyal to his captain's —no, his  _ brother’s _ — command.

“Go,” Hongjoong says and his voice is resolute, giving Yunho one last glance before turning away. 

He hardly moves, and yet it feels as though the space between the two of them is stretching, pulling Yunho further and further away from Hongjoong, now a fixed point in the ever-growing distance. The feeling in his gut is familiar, like he's leaned himself too far back on the hind legs of his chair. He's teetering, and he knows this means he only has seconds left before he plummets.

So, he runs. Not for want of self-preservation but to close the gap, to lace his fingers with Hongjoong's like he has so many times before and pull him with him. They could make it out of there together, or they'd both go down together, like they'd promised when they first set out to sea.

_ Three _ .

“I'll make this right, Yunho.”

Hongjoong’s words echo as he takes the first step in the opposite direction. The ground beneath Yunho’s feet buckles, dragging him down, down like quicksand threatening to swallow him whole. He tries to call out, but his voice fails.

_ Two  _ .

“Just have faith in me.”

He reaches out his hand for the retreating form of his friend as his vision clouds, and then—

_ One . _

__

Nothing.

-⧖-

For a moment, Hongjoong can almost swear he can still feel Yunho’s presence there with him, like a lingering warm hand on his shoulder. It’s comforting, the idea of having someone there with him in the dark, but soon even the lightness of his very first friend’s essence leaves him, and the room feels infinitely colder. He turns back, Yunho’s name on his tongue, and the silence of the void answers instead. 

He is alone at the end of the world — stuck somewhere between the known and the unknowable. Limbo.

_ “You have come to bargain,” _ voices call from the dark ahead of him, and Hongjoong turns back to face his Shadow. The Shadow stares at him coolly from under the low brim of his black fedora, gaze piercing and expression unreadable under his mask. The voices seem to emanate not from him but from everywhere at once, like multiple people speaking over each other in unison. 

In its hand is a nearly empty hourglass, the falling sand inside of it locked in suspended animation. It glistens impossibly against the inky darkness like shards of polished sea glass. In another life, Hongjoong might have regarded it as something of beauty — he’d always had a knack for collecting eclectic things — but in this one, he knows better. The sand in it, the  _ time _ in it, was his own. And it was almost out.

“Yes. On behalf of my friends,” he says. What he really means is brothers.  _ Family _ . Somehow, he feels as though admitting so would make this whole process more cruel.

_ “Your friends and not yourself? That is… curious.” _

“I’m the reason we’re in this mess in the first place.” Hongjoong swallows thickly. His throat feels like it’s been rubbed raw with sandpaper. “I promised them I would protect them. I need to… fix this.”

_ “A noble cause,”  _ the Shadow says, its voices mocking. The reverberations of them shake Hongjoong to his very core.  _ “You will bear the burden for seven souls? For a request such as yours, the universe requires... balance.” _

A beat. “Yes, I’ll bear it.”

_ “Without knowing the cost? Such a brave, lost boy.” _

-⧖-

On the other side of the universe, Yunho falls in his dream and shoots upright in a bed he hasn’t slept in in years. His mother insists that he’s had a fever for nearly a week, that his friends have been stopping by routinely to check on him and to bring him his school work. When the questions he asks her only yield more questions and few answers (she’s convinced that he must just need more rest since the fever has only just broken), he presses the heels of his hands to his temples, pushing so hard that he feels like his eyes will pop out of his head. 

How can he be home? What school work? What fever? Hadn’t they just spent the better part of the last two years in the wind? At sea? Knocking on Death’s door?

He scrambles for his phone on the bed-side table, unlocking it in such haste that he almost,  _ almost _ , misses the date on the lock screen

  1. September.



Impossible.

His fingers stutter as he fumbles with the keyboard, sending a shaky message to the group chat and requesting his friends to meet at the old warehouse where they’d set up a clubhouse as kids. Slowly, confused reponses trickle in, each notification making the hair rise on the back of Yunho’s neck. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. He gives it ten minutes, stumbling around his room on sea legs as he pulls on his hoodie and jacket, slips past his mother in the living room and out the back door.

When he checks his phone again by the eleventh minute, his heart begins to sink as he breaks into an uneasy sprint down the back road to the warehouse. 

There is no waiting message from Hongjoong.

-⧖-

The void is lonely. 

Hongjoong feels like he’s been here for centuries, but in observing the hourglasses he’s come to understand that time here passes differently. What feels like decades to him might only be minutes, seconds elsewhere, and surely where his friends are, time must be being set back into motion, just as fate had always intended. That had been what he had been promised, anyway.

The hourglasses that the Shadow has given him sit in a row before him, each of the eight filled with those glassy fragments. When the sand had first begun to rise back to the top, Hongjoong had thought the Shadow had played a trick on him, that this had all been some kind of trick, but as the sand in the first hourglass began to fall normally again, the voices had made it clear that the reality of the deal that he had made was much worse.

Each glowing grain of sand was a moment in time, yes, but it was also a memory. Hongjoong had tempted fate for too long, and at the insistence of his wanderlust and greed for more, like Icarus, he had flown them all too close to the sun. This was the price he would pay, the toll exacted for dreaming too far beyond his means. The universe demanded balance, and balance she would have.

For his friends, this meant waking up safe at home after a long slumber, heads full of dreams of plundering and misadventure. For Hongjoong, it meant watching as he undid his existence in every one of their lives, erasing himself from the very fabric of the collective story that he had helped to weave. Only when the last of the other seven hourglasses began to fall again would the sand in Hongjoong’s run out. Then, with his debt finally paid, he would be able to rest.

Watching each hourglass begin to run normally again hurt more than the one that had preceded it, and now, staring at Yunho’s nearly restored one, part of Hongjoong couldn’t help but selfishly wish that he’d succumbed to the darkness that day along with everyone else. Death, it seems now, would have been kinder than agreeing to the deal. Yet another consequence he had wrought upon himself.

He puts his head in his hands. Watching Yunho, who had been with him the longest, forget that he’d ever existed will undoubtedly be the hardest, and frankly Hongjoong isn’t sure he’ll be able to see it through. Instead, he tries his best to remember everything he can in the last few moments he has. He thinks of epic battles, of hidden treasures, of sun and sky and sea and how all of that glory paled even still in comparison to true camaraderie and the unique serendipity of having experienced it all at that time, in that way, with those friends who had become his family.

“I did what I could. I just hope it was enough,” he says into the ether, watching as Yunho’s hourglass pauses for a moment, then begins to flow downwards again. For the first time in a long time, there are no voices left to mock him or torment him. There is no Shadow. “You won’t remember, but I hope you can forgive me.” 

At the end of the row sits the hourglass on its side, the sand inside of it unmoving, unchanged from the way it had been received. Hongjoong closes his eyes, a tear of regret and relief escaping for just a moment before he turns it rightside up and surrenders, letting the darkness welcome him into its embrace like an old friend.

-⧖-

In a warehouse on the other side of the universe, Yunho leans his chair back until it’s balanced on only its hind legs, only half listening as Seonghwa and Wooyoung launch into an animated debate about what their shared dream experiences could possibly mean. Somewhere behind him, he can hear the dull whir of the wheels on Yeosang’s skateboard as San takes it for a spin, can see Mingi and Jongho playing videogames on the TV out of the corner of his eye. The general consensus is that it must have been some kind of shared delusion — maybe all those years of being friends had finally done them in and they were all slowly going completely bonkers together — but Yunho can’t help but feel like something must be missing. He checks the group chat again and he could swear that there used to be seven other numbers in the chat room, but everyone else insists that he must have imagined it. Over time, it becomes easier to just agree that maybe he had.

After that he never mentions it again to anyone, not wanting to look any more foolish than he's sure he already does, but sometimes in his dreams he still hears the crash of ocean waves, still sees a ship sailing through clouds in impossible shades of purple and orange and pink, and on occasion he still remembers a charismatic pirate captain with a Cheshire cat smile, whose name he knows but can never quite remember, who perhaps in a different life he would have followed to the ends of the earth. 

_ fin. ⧖ _


End file.
